The first close-up photos of Pluto gave astronomers their best look ever at the dwarf planet, which has mountains and canyons and possibly even snow.

"It really says a lot about what we can do with our technology," said Darren Williams, professor of physics and astronomy at Penn State Behrend. "These images were taken by a spacecraft 3 billion miles from Earth, functioning just as we intended it to."

Forest composition, ground cover and topography are the best predictors of forest fire severity in the Western U.S., according to Penn State physical geographers who also see that the long history of fire exclusion on federal lands leads to uncharacteristically severe burns and potentially changes the dynamics of forests and their recovery.

A new project to help identify and remediate harmful algal blooms could make Pennsylvania ponds and lakes safer for people and animals. With a grant from the Penn State-based Pennsylvania Water Resources Research Center, trained Penn State Extension educators will collect data to help determine the abundance of these blooms and conduct workshops and other outreach activities to educate and assist pond and lake owners.

A team of five Penn State students won second place and $10,000 in the highly competitive, international Imperial Barrel Award (IBA) program, hosted by the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (AAPG) and the AAPG Foundation. More than 1,000 students from 132 teams, representing 36 countries, competed. The five Penn State students, all pursuing master’s degrees in geosciences, each spent 60-80 hours weekly for eight weeks straight on a real-world geosciences application: oil exploration.

Today’s power systems are going through a significant transition to move toward a more sustainable framework. This can be seen by the increasing integration of renewable resources, the growth of distributed generation, the burgeoning need for dispatchable grid storage and heightened levels of demand by companies around the world.

Carbon 14 dating of scarlet macaw remains indicates that interaction between Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon, New Mexico, and Mesoamerica began more than 100 years earlier than previously thought, according to a team of archaeologists.

High in the sky where the cirrus ice crystal clouds form, jet contrails draw their crisscross patterns. Now researchers have found that these elevated ice cloud trails can influence temperatures on the ground and affect local climate, according to a team of Penn State geographers.